Samenvatting

Instrument/Tool: Network Analysis. It was developed in a research project on process improvement in small and medium sized companies in the north of the Netherlands. The instrument takes so-called worker frustrations as its starting point. A worker gets frustrated when he is confronted with a problem, a process disturbance or process interruption, that he cannot solve. Such unsolved problems are a nuisance when executing his work. They are irritating, for you cannot perform your work in a proper way. And at the same time they constitute efficiency problems for the company itself. That is basically what the quote from Schonberger is saying: “worker frustrations are a sound priority list of opportunities for improvement for the company.” The instrument is meant to make an inventory of these worker frustrations and to do so in a participative way, that is, with the team of workers concerned.